Martin Luther King: preacher, prophet, poetDuring MUSC's Jan. 15 MLK Program, Dr. McCurdy and Tom Waldrep shared their views of the 60s and Dr. Kingby Dr. Layton McCurdy
On Dec. 5, 1955, almost 50 years ago, King, barely 26 years old, was chosen as the compromise candidate to lead the effort in Montgomery, Alabama to consolidate the African-American population as they protested their treatment by Montgomery’s City Bus Department. Some in this room will remember Rosa Parks who defied Montgomery’s segregation laws. She sat in the front of the bus. A boycott was underway. Black people were being jailed. The movement needed a leader. Martin Luther King Jr., barely known as a young preacher, was selected spokesperson and leader of the movement named “The Montgomery Improvement Association.” Twelve years later, he was dead, killed by an assassin’s bullet. He had not reached his 40th birthday. In those 12 short years he gave visionary leadership to a movement and a cause that changed our nation. We will never be the same. Tonight I want to talk about Martin Luther King Jr. I want to talk about myself, and I want to talk about you. Who was this man? He was the grandson of a slave, a fourth generation Baptist Preacher, educated with a Ph.D., married and would ultimately father four children, he was a prophet and he was a poet. He moved people with his vision and his words. One cannot listen to Martin Luther King’s words without being moved. A prophet sees things that others cannot see. He describes what he sees and it comes to life. Such was King. Listen to his words: “There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by oppression. There comes a time when people get tired of being plunged into the abyss of exploitation and nagging injustice.” Ten years later in Birmingham, when children were being jailed for nonviolent
civil disobedience, there were mass meetings night after night with King
speaking, providing courage and strength to continue and sustain. Providing
comfort to people, who worried about their children and themselves, their
jobs and their lives. He spoke of their efforts as “a tunnel of hope being
dug through a mountain of despair.” He preached constantly the message
of freedom and human dignity. Listen to the poetry in these words:
Always, he would remind his audience of what we had not done for freedom and justice. His life, his speech, and his leadership brought reality to the words of the Apostle John: “The light shines in darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” Martin Luther King’s words reached and touched every human heart who listened, even his adversaries. He preached concern for families, friends, and neighbors. He preached for those who worked for justice, freedom and peace. He preached for the victims of hunger, fear, oppression, and sorrow. Most of all, he preached for the freedom of his people. He spoke daily, often several times a day. We all know the “I Have a Dream” speech, his declaration made in the shadow of our nation’s capital, but many have not heard the powerful rhetoric, inspiring, moving that he delivered day after day after day. Whenever he was asked about the gains that had come about as a result of his efforts and speeches, King answered with a metaphor. He would smile his tired smile and say that the black man has straightened his back and you can’t ride a man whose back is not bent. Although the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were monuments to his efforts in his life time, he usually evaluated his achievement in terms of promise for the future. We live in that future. He had the preacher’s and actors’ and politicians’ knack of translating every stray piece of information into dramatic ideas. He was a shrewd social strategist. He had the prophet’s eye for seeing local injustices and the poet’s ability to fit that local injustice into a transcendent truth. This is the gift of metaphor. The power of those abilities led to the
actions that occurred and were a direct result of his skills. He had the
capacity through his rhetoric to fill his audience, mostly African-Americans,
with a sense of courage and self respect. He used literary, biblical and
philosophical illusions to assure his black listeners that history and
universal moral law were aligned with their quest for freedom. Listen to
his words:
His eloquence and the rhetorical idiom moved people to action. He spoke always for integrity, nonviolence, persistence and immediacy. He believed, from the bottom of his heart, that things would change. He said over and over, “we stand at the daybreak of freedom.” “We stand at the daybreak of freedom.” I grew up in a segregated south. My father was a farmer. There were six African-American sharecropper families on our farm. I worked side by side with black people. I played with them. I hunted with them. But I did not go to school with them. Much of what I learned about people, life and values, I learned from my black friends. But I did not recognize the obvious injustice of white and colored water fountains and restrooms. It didn’t jolt my awareness that I had no black classmates at the University of North Carolina, or in med school here at MUSC. It was as a junior medical student that I finally was jolted with the injustice of segregation. To be sure, there had been the Supreme Court decision about school segregation in 1954. While it may have registered on my conscious mind, somehow it seemed far away. My awakening came in this hospital on 7-East. And by the way, the East floors were black and the West floors were white. My awakening came, thanks to a charge nurse named Green. She is still around although retired. After a particularly grueling evening of scut work, when the residents and interns had left for other adventures, I suggested to Mrs. Green that we go downstairs and partake in the free late night snack. She looked at me and said, “you and I don’t eat in the same dinning room.” Mrs. Green was about my color which in many ways made my lesson more powerful. I didn’t sleep much that night. I found myself reviewing the good times with my black friends, both my age and older, and my willingness to buy into the argument that I had heard so many times, “we treat our black people well.” Ironically, this was 1958 when Martin Luther King was emerging as a powerful spokesperson. Television was beginning. We could watch the news and features. I found myself looking, searching for instances of obvious injustice. They were abundant. The employment rosters in our hospital and medical school had clear color lines above which employees were white. I could visit the black dining room but not the reverse. How long will this take. When will this change? I became impatient with what Martin Luther King called gradualism. “Good things are happening. Things happen in time.” Fast forward to 1968, March, I moved to Charleston with my wife and two small children to become the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry. Within two weeks Martin Luther King was assassinated. It had been a year of death. More was to come. Within weeks a set of circumstances arose which would become a major event in MUSC’s history. A northeastern hospital union, 1099-B, had been in Charleston for at least a year seeking to unionize hospital workers at our hospital and others. The governor had drawn the line. State employees would not be unionized. And while the issue was ostensibly unionization, the core issue was race. Union members would be drawn from the job ranks mostly filled by African-Americans. Union officials were mostly black. Four hospital employees staged a sit-down in the office of Dr. William McCord, president of the Medical University. He had them physically removed and fired. The strike was on. Many hospital workers walked out. The hospital staff went down to skeleton force. The job was to keep the hospital open. Threats of violence started against people in the black community who continued to come to work. There were pickets and soon the National Guard was here with a curfew. Special passes were required to come into the hospital after curfew hours. You couldn’t be on the streets. A few of our students joined the picket lines. In a well-intended but misguided effort to provide comfort to those employees who were coming to work, Dr. McCord drew a line in the sand and said we will never rehire the strikers. I learned that you never say never. Every morning the clinical chairmen would meet with the state law enforcement officers (SLED). We had a war room on 2-West in what is now Radiology. Daily, we were posted on activities on the streets and the staffing in the hospital. The psychiatry inpatient units were on the 10th floor of the hospital. Interestingly, we had no strikers. No one stayed out of work. I would like to think it was my brilliant leadership, however, I had only been here a few weeks. We did have meetings with our staff and kept them posted about what I learned every morning. Into the scene came the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Martin Luther King’s organization now led by the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. The strike lasted several weeks and ultimately a compromise was negotiated as is often the case. It was during those negotiating sessions that I met Andrew Young who was with the SCLC. I also started a lasting friendship with Father Henry Grant, an African-American Episcopal Priest, who ran St. John’s Mission Center on the Eastside. A few years later it would become my privilege to chair the board of St. John’s Mission Center and work closely with Henry Grant. Those of you in this audience who knew Father Grant will likely endorse my perception that there was no more dedicated and administratively creative pilgrim in this state. With Henry, every day was an adventure. He believed deeply that if a child could read he could learn. St. John’s Mission Center was committed to having every child read. In addition to my work, my wife tutored. It was a wonderful experience for both of us. But back to the strike. Andrew Young and Henry Grant negotiated an agreement for the strikers to come return to work. The leader of the famous four who had been fired was Mrs. Mary Moultrie, a nursing assistant. Because we had no strikers and thereby minimal tension from neighborhood threats, it was decided that Mrs. Moultrie would come work in Psychiatry. I remember taking Andrew Young and Henry Grant on a tour of the 10th floor. Andrew Young, not so well known then, was concerned that Mary Moultrie would be working behind locked doors. Perhaps sending a bad message. I had a wonderful opportunity to give him my short lecture on how the mentally ill were stigmatized. He suggested I go into preaching. If Martin Luther King had been alive, I believe I would have met him during this strike. He would have been here. As I reflect back on those days, as tense and problematic as they were, I am grateful for the growth that occurred in me and many other people. We learned. We made progress. Too slowly, but we made progress. Fast forward to 1990. I returned to Charleston from Philadelphia to become dean of the Medical School. It was an exhilarating moment for me. Much progress had been made at MUSC on many fronts. Much remained to be done. We quickly completed a strategic plan which included a specific objective to increase the number of minority students in our medical school. I met with the half dozen minority students we had at the time and asked their help in recruiting. I will remember always, they looked at me and one woman said, “Dr. McCurdy, we’re not going to help you. This is not a good place if you’re black.” I was stunned but asked more questions and came to understand that she was reporting fact. I knew that there had to be someone on our faculty whose job it was to attend to the life and welfare of our minority students. I believed the person should be a practicing physician with whom those students could identify. I talked with many people in the school and in the community and came to the conclusion that Thad Bell was the man. I had met Thad during his medical school days but I really did not know him. I made him an offer which he declined. His practice was too busy. A few months went by as I sought other alternatives. None seemed as good. A tragedy occurred in Thad’s life, he lost his son, a young man with great promise. After an appropriate interval, I went back to Thad thinking this tragedy might change his life. I was right. He accepted our job and became our associate dean, part time, at which he continues. He has done a great job. We exerted a full court press and our numbers increased. In 1996 or 1997 we were given an award for achieving growth in our numbers of minority students. Much, much remains to be done in recruiting students and faculty. “We stand at the daybreak of freedom.”
The tragedy of these past months makes us vulnerable to stasis. We cannot stand still. More than anything, I fear stasis. Great things can happen in times of peril. A crisis can become a rehearsal for progress. Will danger and the threat of danger make us static. It need not. Listen to King’s words from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:
Martin Luther King Jr. espoused the very thing that is at risk today. He had an enduring belief that we were close. That time was short. That the quest was urgent. What would he say about our world responsibilities in light of so many of peoples who live in hunger and despair—nations where the seeds of terrorism grow and flourish. It is easy to not see injustice and need as the fertile soil for terror. The only thing worse than being blind is having eyes that do not see. I remember the days, months, and years that I walked past white/colored and I did not see. That seems hard to believe now. The lesson I learned is to challenge myself and you. What do we walk past every day now and not see. What do you and I walk
past every day, blindly oblivious, or not caring? We step across homeless,
mentally sick people on the streets of our cities. We know that they are
there but do we see them? We feel helpless and choose not to do anything
about it. What will people say fifty years from now about that, and us?
Many of you will be here fifty years from now, what will you think about
yourself? What about children who grow up on the streets in this country
and elsewhere because there is not enough food or protection? Do you look
every day for opportunities to eliminate injustice, misery and oppression?
Do you seek opportunities for random acts of kindness? What can each of
us, you - me, do in the spirit of Martin Luther King to further the cause
of racial equity and justice, and most of all, the fulfillment of every
human’s potential? We stand at the daybreak of freedom.
King: not about black rights, but human rightsby Tom WaldrepCenter for Academic Excellence and The Writing Center I grew up in a small town, Roanoke, Alabama, just 90 miles south of Birmingham and about the same distance northeast of Montgomery—a town not unlike many in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Louisiana, or Tennessee. This was a town populated by Southern Baptists and Methodists, one Church of God, one Catholic family, and one Jewish family. Not only did I mature in this small town, I survived this small town. But that still does not qualify me as keynote speaker, so I am not here this evening to bring the main sermon, I am just here, as Dr. King often said, “to make testimony, to give a testimony.” Roanoke had only one radio station and still does to this day, and in the late 50’s and early 60’s, we heard on WELR (an acronym for We Enjoy Living in Roanoke) of a man -a Preacher King— from Montgomery. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was challenging the status quo by asking a few good men in a number of communities-Birmingham, Albany, Selma, Atlanta-to join his path of nonviolent protest in the name of freedom for all humans. In fact, just yesterday morning on the Today Show an interview with Dr. King was replayed from the ‘60’s and he corrected the host asking him questions -“No, I am not about black rights—you must get this straight. I am about human rights.” King knew that to reach his opponents he had to stir their conscience to reconciliation and then to reality. He knew desegregation could break down legal barriers and could possibly bring men together physically, but he also knew that something stronger was needed to touch the hearts and souls of men so they would come together, not because a law says it, but because it is natural and right. In other words, our ultimate goal in securing integration in the 60’s and obliterating racism as it exists today and celebrate diversity as we should today, requires genuine inter-group and interpersonal living, giving accessibility for all to all. I came to this theory in the 60’s as I survived and overcame both physically and mentally what I have come to call the Senseless Sixties. As a child my mom often reminded me that I asked too many questions. I asked the question why my best friend and first girlfriend, when I was just 6 years old, had to ride the black school bus to her school just two blocks from mine, and I had to ride the white school bus? I can still see Miriam Ford’s round, smiling, shiny face as she waved to me from her third window back on the bus just behind the driver. I asked the question why we couldn’t be in the same school with the same teachers, since we were in the same grade and had the same books required by the same city school system. As I grew older, I asked the question why Miriam and her brothers and sisters had to go North to college. Why not Alabama, or Auburn, or Jacksonville State University where the rest of the majority of us Alabama kids was going? My questions were seldom answered directly. But, I knew because I was there. I was there in Roanoke where while working in the local surgeon’s office during high school and my undergraduate years at Alabama there was a waiting room “For Whites Only,” and one for blacks not even identified. I was there at the local county hospital working on weekends in the emergency room where blacks were admitted to the “Black Hall” and whites admitted to the other corridors of the hospital. I was there in Roanoke where in the town's only restaurant, the City Café, blacks were not allowed to enter, much less dine, but picked up paper plates of food from a back window to eat at home or on the “back street.” I was there in Roanoke where black teenagers could not go to the only Dairy Queen to get a hamburger or hotdog with French fries and strawberry shake—to sit in the car and listen to Buddy Holly or Elvis Presley or Nat King Cole or Sammy Davis Jr. Blacks were not even allowed on the property. I was there in Roanoke, too, watching the Atlanta television stations when the Rev. Martin Luther King took his freedom march to Washington and reported his “dream.” He reported ever so eloquently how the blacks of America wanted to cash the check that Abraham Lincoln 100 years earlier had given them when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. King reported America had defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as the citizens of color had nothing more than a check marked “insufficient funds.” King knew the bank of justice was not bankrupt. He knew there were sufficient funds, and he knew that now (1962) was the time to give blacks upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. I was there, too, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama after high school graduation, when I stood in the long line to register for my pre-medicine classes in front of Foster Auditorium (the basketball gymnasium). Reporters of the news media-national television, newspaper, radio, national news magazines-all were around us, trying to work their way to Vivian Malone and Jim Robinson, the first two blacks to register successfully at the University of Alabama and attend classes. Yes, I was there at this time when Alabama’s segregationist Gov. George Wallace, so proudly, so affirmatively, so arrogantly, “stood in the schoolhouse door,” and Robert Kennedy, attorney general of the United States, with the help of the National Guard, removed him. I was there when Vivian Malone was asked by the reporter, “What are you doing here? Why do you want to come to Alabama?” and she answered, “I just want to get a good education.” I was there when that statement seared my mind, and I knew she wanted nothing more than what a small town rural Alabama white boy wanted. She was my Miriam Ford from a dozen years earlier speaking loudly over the crowd of National Guardsmen and news media. I was there at Alabama when I too began the dream that one day I could live in Roanoke or Atlanta or Birmingham or Charleston and know the true meaning of “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.” I was there at Alabama when I realized that any man should unashamedly and with pride be a “nigger- lover,” as I was so often called, because it was natural and right to love all men no matter what their skin color, their ethnicity, their sexual preference, or their religious affiliation. I was there at Alabama when I began to listen and learn and know who truly is educated. I was there at Alabama in the cafeteria at Woods Hall, having a bowl of hot, spicy chili, when I heard those fateful words on Nov. 22, 1963 that “The president has been shot by an assassin’s bullets in Dallas, Texas while riding in a motorcade.” President Kennedy died shortly thereafter at Parkland Memorial Hospital. I was there in Alabama on April 4, 1968 studying biochemistry upstairs in my room when I heard that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot in Memphis, Tenn., by an assassin’s bullets. I was there, too, in Alabama on June 6, 1968 when the late night news reported Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, a candidate for president of the United States, had just been shot in California after a political rally. Yes, I was there and watched in helplessness and shock in the Senseless Sixties as the hate crimes were being committed against not only the world’s most intelligent and popular men, but also the everyday hard-working day laborers, maids, mill workers, mechanics, preachers and teachers, and lawyers This was all a part of my education and my maturation. These incidents
have shaped my life and made me who I am today. Interestingly enough, it
was one of Martin Luther King’s mentors, Socrates, who had lived between
436 and 399 BC, a man who was living almost 2000 years before Preacher
King, who summarized “the good education” to which Vivian Malone and I
aspired. Interestingly enough, it was a white man, a
“Whom then do I call educated?”
With this definition in mind, then, let us celebrate not only the genius of Martin Luther King Jr. but also his education and his foresight and wisdom in the way he attempted to mentor all Americans. If America is to continue as a great nation, if we are to continue as a great institution-the flagship health profession institution— we must value education, celebrate education, promote education, and let education ring from every small rural South Carolina town to every major city in this country. I have grown up with people poking puns and fun at Alabama and the whole South. But I am grateful that I have learned that educators must recognize that all of God’s children are different, have different learning styles, learning capacities, and different understandings of learning theories. And, the research has informed us that none of this has to do with color of skin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. So when I meet the racist, the arrogant, the defiant, the one who condescends, the one who thinks he or she knows it all, I simply smile and think, “where were you educated, where did you learn all that you think you know.” I also remember another of my mom’s axioms-“Honey, don’t you worry about him, don’t you let him intimidate you, he gets in his britches every morning just like you do, one step at time, sweet Jesus!” Now that was an educated woman! Yes, I stand proud tonight that I can claim Martin Luther King Jr.,
not only as a fellow Alabamian, but one who shares his legacy, and one
who asked many of the same questions as he did.
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